Thomas Lee's collection of random interesting items, views on things, mainly IT related, as well as
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Saturday, March 07, 2015

Azure Portal Shortcut keys

The latest version of the Azure Preview Portal shipped a few weeks ago. One of the features of that new portal is that it now supports keyboard shortcuts.

Those not familiar with the new portal need to learn the concept of blades. These are UI elements which pop out to the right. Bringing up the Virtual Machines blade shows all the VMs in your account; clicking on a specific VM brings up that VM's blade. You can then open subsidiary blades e.g. to manage the VM's settings. The new portal also has notification hub where you get notification messages (that a VM you created has indeed been created). There's also a billing blade that shows you your subscriptions and how much credit each subscription has.

One of the cool features added to the updated Preview Portal is adding shortcut keys. These are single key strokes that do useful things! There are two sets of short cut keys

Hub Menu – when you are focused on the left hand 'hub' in the portal:

H – shows the portal start board (as customised by you!)

N – shows the notification hub and any recent notifications

A – shows the active journey hub – this is a starting point for any sets of blades you have opened (a VM's configuration, etc)

/ – show the search hub

B – shows the billing hub (all your subscriptions and credit left)

C – shows the Create/New Hub blade

Blade Navigation - If you have several blades open (e.g. VMs, a VM, a VM's setting) you can navigate between the individual blades (i.e. between the blades in an active journey)